According to Lacan, “jouissance” is a socially mandated feeling of living enjoyment, the lack of which engenders a guilt that serves, among other things, to keep the subject submitted to the status quo . . . does that sound right to the experts here? - If so, could this be considered a legitimate area of ideological overlap between Lacan and Foucault?

Just curious . . .

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — February 22, 2008 @ 5:26 pm

Jacques Alain Miller’s paper ‘The Paradigms of Jouissance’ in LacInk 17 looks at different versions of Lacan’s jouissance.
There’s reference to it at https://www.lacan.com/frameXVII2.htm

Comment by Chris Sands — February 22, 2008 @ 6:54 pm

jouissance is apolitical category:today this ideological manipiulatiopn of obscene jojouissance has entered a newstage.our politics is more and more directly the politics of jouissance concerned with ways of soliciting or controling and regulating jouissance.is not the entire opposition between the liberal/tolerant west and fundamental Islam condensed in the opposition between on the one hand ,a woman’s right to free sexuality,including the freedom to display/expose herself and provoke/disturb men ,and,on the other hand desperate male attempts to eradicate this threat or at least keep it under control?

Comment by hadi — February 23, 2008 @ 8:50 am

the superego aspect of today’s “nonrespective”hedonism(the constant provocation to which we are exposed ,enjoining us to go right to the end and explore all modes of jouissance)resides in the way permitted jouissance necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance.

Comment by hadi — February 23, 2008 @ 8:59 am

Hadi, with 184, in one sense jouissance is apolitical if we understand the symbolic as political, but with paranoia, don’t we see jouissance forced into the place of the Other and with psychosis, surely there’s also a politics of the real or a supplementing of the real???
With your image of desperate patriarchy, I wonder what happens in the case of the ‘fort da’ game. Surely no teasing, but also an insistence that the first Other (mother) is not a woman.
If there is a politics of the real, could it have to do with finding a way to include the desire that we see with ‘fort da’ when the game is imaginary, symbolic - and real?

Comment by Chris Sands — February 23, 2008 @ 4:37 pm

What’s ‘fort da”?

and arent these all just fancy, self-important ways of talking about good old fashioned sexual repression? or am i being to reductive?

Comment by braton fuzzledorf — February 23, 2008 @ 10:01 pm

I mean, you can generate a “politics-of” anything out of the symbolic soup of the contemporary ideological marketplace - after a while it just gets old.

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — February 23, 2008 @ 10:32 pm

184.jouissance is a political category.

Comment by hadi — February 24, 2008 @ 2:21 am

Braxton, ‘fort da’ is reference to Freud’s ‘now you see it now you don’t game’ and and there may be a different take on this game with psychosis, but what’s this about soup?
Hadi, that was interesting. It read 184 as - jouissance is (an) apolitical category, not jouissance is a political category … perhaps this is how political change happens, we see an ‘a’ before the political or Braxton’s cold soup.

Comment by Chris Sands — February 24, 2008 @ 7:11 am

“fort da”
In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Standard Edition, Vol. 18, pp. 14-15), Freud wrote:
This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out “o-o-o-o,” accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word “fort’” [gone]. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play “gone” with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive “o-o-o-o.” He then pulled the reel again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful “da” [there]. This, then, was the complete gameódisappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act. The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement — the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting.

Comment by violet — February 24, 2008 @ 7:45 am

There’s so much presence with Freud’s text!

Comment by Chris Sands — February 24, 2008 @ 12:04 pm

Hi dear Hadi! We should not forget to give the reference when we cite a passage from a work!!

Comment by Majid — February 25, 2008 @ 12:49 pm

that’s right, Majid….. who says jouissance is a political category? is 184 Zizek?

Comment by violet — February 25, 2008 @ 12:56 pm

hi Violet! Thank you for the passage from Freud! The concept of “fort/da” is also evident in the anal stage in which the child gains pleasure from controlling the waste and then letting it go.

Comment by Majid — February 25, 2008 @ 1:03 pm

Majid, no that’s Poo/ur

Comment by Chris Sands — February 25, 2008 @ 7:25 pm

Hi violet! Yes it’s Zizek in Parralax view.

Hi Chris! you are right I think; but don’t you think that there is a similarity? Can you tell me more about Poo/ur? I’ll be grateful!

Comment by Majid — February 26, 2008 @ 4:31 am

Majid, I think Lacan takes something from Dada sometimes, as well as Dada Freud. So perversely, I was profaning the serious business of fort da, which is in itself not without humour. My suggestion has more to with the likes of an interview with artist Wim Delvoye, referred to at https://www.lacan.com/frameXIX7.htm
Sorry.

Comment by Chris Sands — February 26, 2008 @ 4:54 pm

according to lacan, Master signifiers _which are without content_ represent the subject for other signifires,and we believe in the Master signifires because others are supposed to know their content.is not this due to the [in]famous beleife that after the casteration the phallic Thing is possesed by the “Other” and the “Other” is supposed to enjoy?is not this homologous to the fact that priests are supossed to know every thing about God because they are the “Other”to common peaple?

Comment by hadi — February 27, 2008 @ 12:09 pm

with 199:…because they are the “Other”to common people?

Comment by hadi — February 27, 2008 @ 12:14 pm

hadi - the Other is not suppose to enjoy…. and this is how Lacan says the Other - the analyst - is semblance

Comment by violet — February 28, 2008 @ 11:12 am

the Other of the pervert enjoys… the voyeur - Other of the pervert in the park looking at couples making love… he enjoys the fact that he can get caught and so provoke that the couple insults him, that they call the police… actually he enjoys
making the couple exhibitionists

Comment by violet — February 28, 2008 @ 2:22 pm

. . . and the couple in the park enjoys the thought of the pervert peering at them through the leaves - it’s evident in the indignation they feel at being spied upon. Indignation in general being among the most gratifying indulgences that otherness offers us, it’s no wonder they rely upon it to spice up their inescapably mundane sexual play.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — February 28, 2008 @ 4:03 pm

In a contemporary secular world, don’t think of preists as castrators so much as oases of submissive release from things like, precisely, the mandate of jouissance.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — February 28, 2008 @ 4:11 pm

both the couple that enjoys the thought of the voyeur peering at them through the leaves, and the voyeur that peers through the leaves , in that they account for the jouissance of the Other are perverts.

Comment by violet — February 29, 2008 @ 11:47 pm

But are they really perverted in any meaningful psychological sense? Or are they just doing what is to be expected? Is the jouissance here really much more than a pale attempt to transgress the boundaries imposed upon them by the social/symbolic order, which thereby - and only SOMEWHAT paradoxically - ensures and perpetuates their continued instrumental participation in the order? Wouldn’t we say, in Lacanian terms, that these “perversions” are really just futile gestures in the direction of the Real from which they have been, and will remain, permenantly exiled?

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — March 1, 2008 @ 12:09 pm

fuzzledorf - when we say “pervert” we are talking a psychoanalytic category, like neurotic, psychotic, pervert, and not moral values - Freud made this categories, and Lacan took it from there. In other languages , like Spanish there is this other word “PERVERSO” which we don’t have in English, an it seems better to not load the word with morals. There’s always some perversion involved with the making love, and who says it’s wrong…

Comment by violet — March 1, 2008 @ 2:41 pm

Well i agree it’s probably not wrong - and i do appreciate the difference between the moralist and psychoanalytic usages of the word - but the terminology seems a little antiquated . . . i mean, are we trying to preserve the analytic methods of Lacan, or merely talk the same way he did? In any case, i suppose it’s hardly worth debating - more interesting to determine what self-directed role these common “perversions” (if that’s what we are calling them) play on behalf of the agents involved. Is it a grasping at air with regards to the Real? Might it be a simple apolitical pleasure/diversion, or does it go deeper than that? Is, for instance, some kind of social/symbolic repression at work behind this particular mode of jouissance?

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — March 1, 2008 @ 5:39 pm

Braxton, there’s plenty of information here and elsewhere about perversion as a clinical structure and beyond that some writers like Zizek have looked at film, literature, politics etc to examine the implications of Lacanian clinical structures.

Comment by Chris Sands — March 1, 2008 @ 7:16 pm

you are so right, Chris Sands…….

Comment by violet — March 2, 2008 @ 4:21 am

okay,okay - wasn’t tying to test anybody’s patience - just looking for an interesting discussion to help me understand without having to sift through reams of obtuse literature. apologies.

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — March 2, 2008 @ 10:20 am

(BF) I think Lacan, psychoanalysis and Lacanian literature tend to be the opposite of quick fix, remedy or easy read. You need to do the work or you don’t, but there’s a lot of extraordinary work available on this site (’the Symptom’, papers by Jacques Alain Miler and others etc.)

Comment by Chris Sands — March 2, 2008 @ 1:24 pm

Fair enough, Chris - i’ve read some Zizek - it seems there’s a distinct formula to the way he interprets Lacan though, which traces back to his (Zizek’s) use of the concept of “Hegelian reversal” as a cornerstone - leading me to believe there might be other approaches, which i was hoping to tease out of those here - but perhaps this has more to do with the way his (Zizek’s again) lectures are presented in published form, to give them a unifying thread (another form of the ‘quick fix’ as you say) - it seems as though some of the Lacanian structures, once they have finally been adequately internalized, become almost ineffable, no?

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 3, 2008 @ 10:23 am

Zizek’s approach to Lacanian Psychoanalysis is not a wholly new one or one different from Lacan’s own; Zizek is Lacan everywhere. Zizek reads Lacan through popular culture. and of course there are traces of German Idealists including Hegel, Fichte and specially Schelling in works of Zizek. You may be amazed to find out that these philosophers have discussed pure Lacanian (psychoanalytical)topics two hundred years ago but indeed Lacan’s formulations are quite much more amazing!

Comment by Majid — March 3, 2008 @ 1:05 pm

BT - you seem to labour the point you want to make, but ‘ineffable’ suggests you find the work inaccessible but call it ineffable. Is this a ‘Hegelian reversal’? Surely an interest in psychoanalysis begins with some curiosity or the work isn’t interesting at all. Zizek highlights a political side of psychoanalysis, but many still saw (or see) Freud as subversive.

Comment by Chris Sands — March 3, 2008 @ 1:19 pm

BT - you seem to labour the point you want to make, but ‘ineffable’ suggests you find the work inaccessible but call it ineffable. Is this a ‘Hegelian reversal’? Surely an interest in psychoanalysis begins with some curiosity or the work isn’t interesting at all. Zizek highlights a political side of psychoanalysis, but many still saw (or see) Freud as subversive.

Comment by Chris Sands — March 3, 2008 @ 1:19 pm

Hmm . . . you seem also, by posting the same message twice, to belabor your point Chris (i kid, of course). Actually, i’m not sure what point it is you perceive me trying to make? I don’t imagine it comes as any great shock that certain expositions of Lacan’s work might be found innaccessible at certain points by those lesser minds among us who nonetheless have a relatively healthy interest and curiosity in psychoanalysis. Zizek (who’s work i actually find quite fascinating) notwithstanding, i must confess i find it suspect and perhaps a little frustrating that so few of Lacan’s disciples (who, interestingly and somewhat myopically, also seem to consider him the end-all be-all of psychoanalysis) are capable of presenting his ideas in anything like a coherent manner, and i can’t help but wonder if this is the result of a certain, as i said, “ineffability” which characterizes some of his structures, or merely a thinly veiled reluctance on the part of his students to allow the rest of the world into the heavily guarded academic fortress of his theoretical schema - coupled perhaps, in some cases and on their own part, with a certain lack of full grasp upon the material itself, which they then choose to mask under reams of turgid, maundering exegesis (i’m thinking in particular of some of Jaques Alain Milar’s papers here on this site - but perhaps, in those cases, it’s just a failure of the translation . . . )

In any case, WHY - on a site seemingly devoted in large part to the rather redundant cause of imbuing Lacan’s work with a distinctly sexy, postmodern chic, and on a message board ostensibly dedicated to discussions among individuals interested in and, to some extent, versed in that work - is there so much resistance to participation in a more basic discussion of the actual MEANING of fundamental Lacanian concepts such as “jouissance”, as well as an apparent lack of interest in the ways in which such concepts might interact with the thoughts and ideas of OTHER such chic, postmodern theorists as, say, Foucoult, or even (innaccessibility apparently being the gold-standard by which profundity is measured) someone like Derrida?

Just curious.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 4, 2008 @ 12:19 pm

according to Zizek “Being”is non-All but ther is “Nothing” beyond/outside it which makes it finite.but if we consider “Nothing”as a kind of being it shoud be included inside/within “Being”which makes it infinite.or Nothing is not a kind of being?pls comment on this.

Comment by hadi — March 4, 2008 @ 12:47 pm

Nothingness, as we conceive of it - or as a phenomenological “thing” - can fairly be said to have its own mode of “being”, at least in some sense (”substance”, after all, and in a manner of speaking, is the fundamental tautology of human experience). This works the same way as when we say, from an existential point of view, that “absence” is its own mode of “presence”. Again, these are ideas which, to some extent, defy expression - but i think what Zizek MAY be getting at is the way in which the metaphysical distinctions we sometimes make in the name of grasping our own place in the universe are actually all just different viewpoints upon the same fundamental “thing” - and that our formation of conceptual dichotomies such as “being”/”nothing”, while cognitively necessarry in their own right, must subsequently be subjected to a kind of “blurring” or “smearing” or “flattening” or “unfolding” process, if we are to ever hope to get a fuller picture of the “that/this” to which they refer.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 4, 2008 @ 2:00 pm

perhaps i should have said “primordial” instead of “fundamental” - but, again, perhaps not.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 4, 2008 @ 2:01 pm

We can include nothingness within the infinity if “being”, but only with a corresponding acknowledgement of the finitude of “being” as it is APART from nothingness. I admit, i’m hard pressed to fully unpack the similarity here, but this statement you (hadi) cite reminds me also of Zizek’s proposal of Woman as being the remainder of Man, while, at the same time, also being the defining limitation by which the “essence”(so to speak, i can’t recall his exact language) of Man is dominated. - These similarities are what i was referring to previously when i spoke of Zizek’s interpretive “formula”, though by no means do i intend that to be taken as a slight to the scope of his insight, which is quite profound.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 4, 2008 @ 3:15 pm

sorry, the first line on that last post should read: “we can include nothingness within the infinity OF being . . . “

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 4, 2008 @ 3:21 pm

I enjoyed the relativity (IF) in concern with your being, Braxton

Comment by alice — March 4, 2008 @ 9:18 pm

Braxton, clearly some conversations fit a university canteen, but this messageboard is quite limited in a conversational sense (it tends to happen in slow motion). If you have philosophical gripes, I’d recommend the nearest canteen, but what is the case with theory based on practice concerns that practice (in the first place). So being eminently dismissive suggests an underlying attitude to a practice (ie. psychoanalysis) - which is OK. but then we’re back to canteens again (and what I think Lacan called ‘a discourse of the university’)

Comment by Chris Sands — March 5, 2008 @ 5:44 am

“Nothing” is not a kind of “being” but a “non-being”; that’s why it is so essential for “being”. “Nothing” is a non-being surplus which sets the “being” in motion forever and ever. Just like the surplus “objet-petit(a)” which leaves the ego desiring forever and ever! “Being” is finitude without border, finitude in motion, infinite finitude. or to put it in Hegelian terms, “being” is always “becoming”.

p.s: Out there in the realm of the Real we can’t speak (of “being” and/or “non-being”); that’s where language comes short.

Comment by Majid — March 5, 2008 @ 9:10 am

Well, Majid - one thing that’s funny about this sort of talk is that we can disagree and still be saying the same things. Non-being is nothing and vice versa, but through it’s profound influence on being it becomes its own mode of substance (this is a kind of a “practical” metaphysics, which stringent followers of the German school tend to resist, because it gives the impression of concretizing the surplus - though that impression is largely a human error of perception), which leads us back to the fundamental experiential tautology wherein we can’t, as you rightfully point out, speak of “being and /or non-being” because they themselves are nothing, and in so BECOMING, join the “infinite finitude” of being.

The paradoxes are fun to play with, but once “semanticized” they either resolve themselves in error or persist in the wholly relative truthfullness of confusion.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 5, 2008 @ 9:46 am

I don’t know Chris, my gripes - if that’s what they are - are, i think, more on the practical than the philosophical end of things. There is a purist streak among (perhaps only some) Lacanians that excludes their own freshly developed fearsome version of otherness in the form of those who don’t speak DIRECTLY to their learned conceptions of psychoanalysis. The result is a kind of tunnel-vision and a self-perpetuating innaccessibility surrounding Lacanian thought AND practice that serves the dual purpose of solipsizing the Lacanian psychoanalytic community and providing it with a pseudo-and all too often ineffectual-motivational fervor in the form of a self-conceived Marxist-style attitude of guerilla-psychology, as it were. This, apart from both co-opting and, in a sense, commodifying the unmistakable genius of Lacan’s work, also supresses it and ensures that its subsequent practical-theoretical heritage remains largely incestuous and stunted.

But maybe i’m just howling at the moon. Maybe the inadaptability of “pure psychoanalysis” to the “symbolic soup of the contemporary ideological marketplace” is as it should be. Maybe Lacan’s genius, like that of so many others, was destined only to inspire a church that deliberately spreads its message in an alienating way so as not to lose the self-congratulatory egoism by which it has gradually come to define itself.

This is not an attack on you or your site, only an expression of concern regarding the role, if any, that Lacanian thought will play in the future of real psychological practice. Will it ever touch in a pragmatic way the subjects/objects of its analytic rigor, or will it always be confined to classrooms, canteens, and a few scattered precariously-funded clinics?

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 5, 2008 @ 10:28 am

majid- I disagree with your comment in that, “non-being” is itself a kind of being.we say :ther IS “Nothing” outside “Being”.so it seems that “Being” has a kind of dominance over “Nothing” and the difference between “Being” and “Nothing” is not a difference between two symmetrical entities but their relation is asymmetrical in that “Nothing” should be included inside/within “Being”, so consequently the difference between these two is not the differance between “Being” and “Nothing” but the difference is between “Being” and Itself(being)!!!

Comment by hadi — March 5, 2008 @ 10:38 am

Dear Braxton,content and form are not exactly matched with each other.the practical end of things will come one day after the revolution in the conent(by psychoanalysis),which does not necessarily involve a revolution in the ostensible form of things,has worked out its way through the form,then the conceptions will be DIRECTLY spoken with a revoulutionizing effect.this shows the noncoincidence of theory with practic.

Comment by hadi — March 5, 2008 @ 11:04 am

BF - you refer to a ‘pure psychology’ (and no doubt you’re referring to a ‘pure psychoanalysis’ and not an ‘applied psychoanalysis’) but despite a rhetoric this seems more like ‘pure anger’. If you’re posing a question, it seems to have to do with meaning or lack of meaning … but is desire best described or experienced in some way?

Comment by Chris Sands — March 5, 2008 @ 1:19 pm

Chris, either youre losing me, or i’m losing you. I didn’t refer to a ‘pure psychology’, i reffered to ‘pure psychoanalysis’, and meant it in the sense opposed to ‘psychotherapy’, which could, in an ideal Lacanian sense, conceivably but by no means necessarily extend to include ‘applied psychoanalysis’.

My anger - if it is there, and regardless of wether or not it is pure on any level - doesn’t, in and of itself, effect the validity (or lack thereof) of the critique either way. Where does the anger come from? Am i unpurely angry at the state of affairs i describe, or am i describing said state of affairs because i am purely angry and in search of an object for the anger? It’s an interesting question, but the answer (if there is one, or, for that matter, more than one) doesn’t justify or excuse the described state of affairs.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 5, 2008 @ 2:10 pm

We can and do defer questions of meaning or lack of meaning in perpetuity, and experience desire partially as a result. In describing desire we can attempt to identify the underlying drive (so description serves a purpose) yet the cost is the compounding of the unanswered questions of meaning/lack. However and on second thought, since those questions continue in infinite storms regardless, the cost is ultimately negligable (spitting into the ocean, as it were). So, to answer your question (i wasn’t clear wether or not it was supposed to be rhetorical): desire is niether “best” described nor experienced, it’s more of an evaluatively neutral fact of life.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 5, 2008 @ 3:03 pm

B - In what sense is desire a fact of life?

Comment by Chris Sands — March 5, 2008 @ 4:21 pm

I find your comment (no 36) quite to the point Braxton.
Sometimes I think that ‘Lacanians’ cite Lacan, giving answers
as if they were ‘true’ when this is quite contrary to Lacan’s
teaching as i understand it. Miller particularly i can’t abide
as, to me, he takes the Master position.
The argument reminds me of Derrida’s ‘Du Tout’ in The Post Card.
Derrida calls the bluff of those present by speaking
of the underground, secret intersection of the schools, whereby
many analysts move to have a ’slice’ of an analysis by someone in
another school, while publically maintaining the ‘crucial difference’ between
their school and the others. Derrida himself is thought to be
the analysts of an analyst - he is very funny when he writes of this.
But this is something of the point - there are church-like elements
in any group - the reluctance to engage with any thinker who
Lacan did not authorise or who he critisised, strikes me
as the opposite of the free speech that Freud was aiming at practising.

Comment by Sol — March 5, 2008 @ 7:11 pm

Chris: I would say in the same human-phenomenological sense as belief or seperation.

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — March 5, 2008 @ 8:02 pm

yes Lacanians don’t seem to be part of a marked tendency in the therapy world to ‘pick-and-mix’ and if there is something less ‘normative’ here, inevitably the work will surely be subject to attacks from many directions. I would also say that JA Miller has done a lot to take Lacan’s late work further. If this implies a shifting from Freudian to Joycean symptoms, there may well be differences in the Lacanian world.

Comment by Chris Sands — March 5, 2008 @ 8:26 pm

Sol, 55 is in response to 53

Comment by Chris Sands — March 5, 2008 @ 8:31 pm

There’s an interesting parallel there, Sol, between the Derridian critique of art-talk and the tendency of some of the more school-oriented Lacanians to “enclose” psychoanalysis within what must necessarily still, and in any fairness, be considered a sketchy, rudimentary framework; especially given the role that their vernacular plays for them in that trend.

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — March 5, 2008 @ 8:36 pm

BF (in response to 54) - then in what sense is ‘lack of desire’ a fact of life?
To imply that something happens may not be enough in many (human) contexts …

Comment by Chris Sands — March 5, 2008 @ 8:37 pm

BF - well, we were briefly online at the same time but it’s late and I’m going to have to take my vernacular to bed

Comment by Chris Sands — March 5, 2008 @ 8:47 pm

Initially, here, i think a “lack of desire” would either have to be a lack of awareness, an indifference in the place of a desire formerly held (like a diminished motivation or a depressive apathy), an active desire AGAINST something (like, if i said “I don’t want to drive”, thereby implying that “I have no desire to drive” or “I desire NOT to drive”), or a simple “i don’t care either way” reaction in regards to some new stimulus. With the exception of the first, these are all reactive phenomena distinct from desire, which seems like a more fundamental engine of human activity in a way that indifference, withdrawal, or resistance to ~ are not.

If, as in the first example, “lack of desire” is a lack of awareness, that might put it on the same phenomenological level as desire itself or belief, but without the motivational properties and therefore without the same level of “factness” as those other so-called facts of life.

Taking the notion of “lack of desire” as a “fact of life” (in the sense i evoked) strikes me as being, at the very least, far more contextually contingent than desire. Desire seems more like an emotional white noise, it’s like our cognitive legs - without it, humanity stops her constant continuing and becomes that much more vegetable and mineral.

But maybe there’s a sense of “lack of desire” which i’m overlooking?

PS - let me reiterate that i’m not attacking you, i hope you and your vernacular enjoy a lovely night’s rest

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — March 5, 2008 @ 10:47 pm

BF (thanks), Sol - If we are talking about ideas and an orthodoxy (church) then it’s hard not to talk about context these days and I suppose Derrida’s conversation with a group of psychoanalysts also contextualises a concern for where ideas come from. I think, in a Lacanian sense, lack of desire may (at the moment) have to do with the hot (but not so hot in the new forum) topic of commensuration, if a very dominant CBT turns desire and therapeutic relationships into terms which can be ‘easily’ evaluated. Alongside of a context that’s political in a mental health sense, but also personal if you’re looking for a way to get out of bed, an ‘orthodoxy’ struggles in any number of contexts. Alain Badiou is a philosopher who contextualises philosophy, but with Badiou, I think there’s little reference to the late Lacan of the sinthome. This is simply one instance, but I think you need to read divergence within what seems like an ‘orthodoxy’.
So beyond some kind of ‘university discussion’, don’t we come across something pressing? In my case, there’s geographical isolation and little chance to develop a vernacular, but I also come across a crippling orthodoxy, which has no regard (whatsoever) for psychoanalysis or contemporary art. In fact, where I live, an ‘effective orthodox’ has brought about a paralysis that’s been international news in past weeks.
Above, there’s mention of JAM’s style, but hasn’t this analyst done much to re-think a practice that’s either relevant to the contemporary world or not. I personally have difficulty with an insistence on ‘live sessions’ and this difficulty is very pressing in my isolated world, but I still see Lacanian opposition to dominant mental health theology as vitally important and symptomatic of a need to keep desire in therapy alive.
Could these ‘theoretical issues’ have to do with something that’s forever fading in a graph of desire sense? Clearly Lacanians are not averse to ‘losing the plot’, but we could look at what may be the case or what not be the case with sinthome and Klienian reparation? There are so many points of contact in the therapy world. There must be many ways to look at desire in therapy and the internet is limited, but surely we contextualize or feel free to personalize what we talk about, which is difficult. This is certainly ‘pas tout’.

Comment by Chris Sands — March 6, 2008 @ 5:59 am

Sorry to be too oxymoronic but what else can Language grant us?

47-”Nothing” can not be a “being” since it is those parts of the Real yet not been encoded inside the Symbolic. “Nothing” and “being” constitute the dialectics of the Real and the Symbolic. Indeed bearing in mind that “Being” has got a meaning “only” inside the Symbolic.

Comment by Majid — March 7, 2008 @ 11:32 am

Chris, i must confess i’m not entirely familiar with the concept of commensuration as it applies to psychoanalysis; however, listening to you write i can’t help but sense (as much as i hate to belabor a point ) traces of Foucoult . . .

In any case, your concerns about the evaluative techniques of the mainstream mental-health industry - not to mention said industry’s overall evolutionary misdirection - are entirely warranted. Indeed, alternative thrusts are desperately needed (as, of course, is “a way to get out of bed” in both the personal and metaphorical sense), but i can’t help but think that if you are relying on the rest of the world’s willingness to plod through the murky depths of arcane linguistic muddles like JAM’s papers in order for your movement to realize any lasting success, then you are doomed - and in such a case it will have been largely a self-defeat.

Granted, this is the human psyche we’re attempting to talk about, so it would be (and is, on the part of so many involved in therapy) hopelessly naive to expect simple answers and easy literature, but a certain minimal level of decipherability is always going to be necessarry if the Lacanian school (both it’s more orthodox and divergent components)ever hopes to have any lasting impact (and yes, i myself even hope for such an impact, despite the frustration). I appreciate the resistance to simplification and popularization, but i think, practically speaking and with full recognition of the cliche, there’s probably a need to find some middle ground . . . in spite of the overt reluctance of many Lacanians to pursue it.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 7, 2008 @ 12:45 pm

Chris: ps - that’s the end of my sermon.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 7, 2008 @ 12:49 pm

Majid, there’s certainly no need for YOU to apologize for the inevitable failure of the symbolic to breach the Real, but it’s important, i think, always to recall the extent to which that symbolic failure is, in fact, the very cornerstone of conceptual dichotomies like “nothing/being” and “symbolic/Real” - and that, therefore, beyond language and the limits of cognition (that is in the purely metaphysical context we are always trying/failing/trying-again to address) such distinctions perenially lose their usefullness/meaning as the “things” underlying them wash over, merge into, overlap and agitate one another . . .

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 7, 2008 @ 1:08 pm

Braxton, as for traces of Foucault, are you linking the ‘panopticon’ idea with all this talk of commensuration?
Otherwise (Sol), am still wondering about eclecticism in therapy, reference to Derrida and disdain for JAM’s writing shown above. If Derrida is surprised by Lacan’s reference to Freud’s ideas, it seems he may still be oblivious to Lacanian psychoanalysis and a theory of four discourses, for example (am not sure of the timing of the Derrida text). What does Lacan acknowledge with Freud? When most of psychoanalysis looks in the direction of a transference to the first Other, this is not the case with Lacan.
I wonder if eclecticism, Derrida in this instance and concern regarding JA Miller’s style, don’t all have to do with a certain ‘mastery’ and a discourse of the hysteric? I think JAM makes the point that the position of the analyst (or a discourse of the analyst) is now comprised by conditions compounded by forms of therapy that thrive in these conditions.

Comment by Chris Sands — March 8, 2008 @ 4:55 pm

66 - last line should be ‘compromised by conditions …’

Comment by Chris Sands — March 8, 2008 @ 5:00 pm

I just don’t like Miller. It’s hot and I’m tired and can’t rouse the energy to explain or examine
-but don’t want to ignore you either..
The “confrontation’ referred to was held in November 1977

Comment by Sol — March 9, 2008 @ 3:10 am

Chris: I was thinking more the Foucoult of Madness and Civilization - but id be indebted to you if you could give me a brief explanation of what the concept of commensuration in psychoanalysis actually refers to . . . then i might be able to better illustrate my point (if i in fact have one - which would depend on wether i’m guessing correctly about what you mean)

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — March 10, 2008 @ 8:28 pm

If you look at the forum, there are two references (’Paris Calling’ documents), but this reference to the effects of ‘evidence based practice’ in mainstream mental health services

Comment by Chris Sands — March 11, 2008 @ 3:53 am

Does anyone have any references to aphasic, mute or speechless patients
or theoretical discussion around this?
Thanks.

Comment by Sol — March 13, 2008 @ 7:30 am

Jakobson describes an aphasic, who because of metaphoric aphasia, couldn’t announce the adverb “no”, n–o, unles you would tell him “Say no”. He could respond: “No, I cannot say no…” showing the word, if dispossessed of its place of enunciation falls as a simple leftover and looses its metaphoric message value…

Comment by alice — March 13, 2008 @ 5:57 pm

Can someone post here the author(s)(?) that Zizek mentions at the end of Part V of the ecology video? Interested in reading some non-sentimental gulag stories…

Comment by lxlxlxl — March 15, 2008 @ 3:53 pm

lxlxlxl — You mean Donald Rumsfeldt? - George Bush’s Secretaty of Defence during the invasion of Irak?

Comment by alice — March 15, 2008 @ 8:50 pm

lxlxlxl and alice — Zizek also mentions Catherine Malabou and specifically her book on Hegel., with Derrida’s contribution to this book “The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic”

Comment by violet — March 16, 2008 @ 1:55 am

alice - I like your example with aphasic, very much…

Comment by violet — March 16, 2008 @ 3:08 pm

Thanks alice

Comment by Sol — March 18, 2008 @ 10:10 am

Does anyone have any references to aphasia
or speechless characters in text or film?
Thanks

Comment by Sol — March 22, 2008 @ 5:05 am

(Sol) the image of the stalker’s daughter in Tarkovsky’s film (’Stalker’) comes (immediately) to mind

Comment by Chris Sands — March 22, 2008 @ 10:29 am

yeah, there’s a Lacanian sense in which we’ve all been born without a mouth . . .

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — March 23, 2008 @ 5:59 pm

somewhere between a 2 dimensional spiral and a ciphered vacuum one can fantasize of finding the real

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — March 23, 2008 @ 6:07 pm

I don’t think so braxton, with Lacan already the baby’s cry is a word — enough to say that the sound comes from a mouth and not from a snout, right?

Comment by alice — March 24, 2008 @ 11:50 am

True, but the baby/toddler/child/adult’s demand is never truly voiced. We are all condemned to a more profound, existential sort of silence by our dependency upon language and the symbolic.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 24, 2008 @ 4:15 pm

(B) but with Lacan, something demanded features at the start of therapy (as in a demand addressed to …) or with Massimo Recalcati in LacInk 30, demand is split between a need for care and a need for love. You seem to be saying something about demand and something about language.

Comment by Chris Sands — March 24, 2008 @ 7:28 pm

M-Other … the baby is hungry, demands to drink, nurses, satifies his/her hunger, and falls asleep. Not hungry anymore the asleep baby will however hallucinate the breast… (the lips move, as sucking) the breast has been separated from the body of the mother, from the mouth of the child - the child’s hunger is satisfied, but the demand is not. Says Lacan in Ecrits “it is between the breast and the mother that the separation takes place, that makes the breast the lost object that is a stake in desire.”

Comment by alice — March 24, 2008 @ 11:31 pm

Hi! Basically Lacan distinguishes between “need”, “demand”, and “desire”; need is merely biological just like the need for food or something; demand is the articulation of this need through language or any other means; and desire is the desire for a mere “lack” in the mother. Lacan explains that when the mother responds (satisfies) the child’s demand (need) something extra is produced; the child, being biologically satisfied, now feels “love” toward the mother. This love is something that the mother lacks; it is a surplus over the mother, an objet petit(a) that leaves the child desiring forever. The mother is seperated from herself; she, now, in the eyes of the child, is something more than a mere sourse for gratifying the biological needs of the child.

Comment by Majid — March 25, 2008 @ 9:29 am

Chris and alice: I guess what i’m trying to get at is a metaphorical sense (perhaps not purely Lacanian after all) in which reliance upon language for communication is like forever speaking through a mouthful of wadded tissue. It bars us from being and selfhood at the same time that it creates the potential for them, thereby condemning us to make constant attempts at - while also always preventing us from ever - fully comprehending or expressing the primordial want which arises from that very situation of being barred. (”Why?”, the child asks, “Why?”, “Why?”, “Why?” . . .) And so the remaining infinite sea of signifiers becomes, in the words of Richard Hell, “God’s consolation prize”. The “either/or” choice of the symbolic order vs. ontological wholeness is the cruelest cosmic joke humanity has ever become the brunt of - especially since there really is, practically speaking, no option one way or the other. Thus, there arises for me a sense in which we might all as well have been born without mouths . . . always demanding that which doesn’t exist and of which we have no concept or comprehension yet live in constant exhausting psychic pursuit of. Sisyphus awaiting Godot, as the cliches would have it . . .

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 25, 2008 @ 9:43 am

(B) Isn’t there something of the graph of desire with what you say?
You pose a question or questions, but we move from the subject to the Other then onto the drive and a certain encore.
(M) yes I’d turned demand into the demand of need and the demand of love with MR’s article in mind, but was thinking of something expressed at the start of transference. But how do we begin to talk about love? How on earth? You say the child loves the m(Other) because the m(Other) lacks the child.
In Television (p39), Lacan says
‘It’s by coordinating the paths traced by a discourse, that (although it may proceed merely from one to the one - that is, from the particular) something new can be concieved, and is able to be transmitted as incontestably by this discourse as in the numerical matheme.
This requires only that somewhere the sexual relation cease not being written, that contingency be established (so to speak), so as to make headway on that which will later be completed by demonstrating such a relation to be impossible, that is by instituting it in the real.’

Comment by Chris Sands — March 25, 2008 @ 5:44 pm

Chris- Not the child; the mother lacks
the object of the child’s desire.
As Lacan said desire is not toward
an object (a positive object)
but a lack (in the other).

Comment by majid — March 26, 2008 @ 10:29 am

thanks Majid, not sure that I understood ‘lacks the object of the child’s desire’ …
On the one hand, I want to say that I sometimes snatch at phrases like ‘the Other as lacking’ or can identify lack with desire, but thinking about desire and subversive lack, I also want to separate (m)Other and the Woman who doesn’t exist.
From time to time, I fill a hole with quotes and at the end of Television, there’s a short text called ‘The Other is Missing’.
It starts: ‘I am within the work of the unconscious.
What it shows me is that no truth responds to malaise other than one particular to each of those whom I call parletres.
There is no common impasse to be found there, since nothing allows one to presume that they are funneled into a common flow …’

Comment by Chris Sands — March 26, 2008 @ 7:56 pm

it’s getting labyrinthine… which, what is THE OBJECT of the child’s desire…….? the mother’s lack of him/her (the child)?
are we in need of a mother’s fort-da?

Comment by alice — March 27, 2008 @ 4:26 pm

Quite so Alice, it lacks a certain something …

Comment by Chris Sands — March 27, 2008 @ 7:20 pm

what else than the mother’s desire for him/her, can the mother’s lack of the child be?
again the M(Other)’s desire for her child is what the child may later recognize as his/her own desire (Other) —- and this Other needn’t be the mother, but an(Other) — only the question matters, Che voui? —>What does the Other want of me?

Comment by violet — March 27, 2008 @ 9:32 pm

93- mother belongs to the Imaginary phase so she should be considered as a small other not an “Other”. As far as I remember the question “Che voui?” is asked when the child has entered the Symbolic and it is the big other(A) who is addressed not the small one (a).

Comment by Majid — March 29, 2008 @ 12:12 pm

But mOther is the privelaged nucleus of the Big Other, no?

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — March 29, 2008 @ 6:58 pm

Chris, a graph of desire is still but a skeleton. Metapseudomath only gets us so far.

Just kidding . . . sorta.

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — March 29, 2008 @ 7:03 pm

if we had always just come from the dentist
and our mouths full of cotton wool
we would seem to be up against the inability to speak
(as in a dream),
rather than the impossibility of speech

but is there something of the impossible in this inability..

say the infant has all this cotton wool in their mouth (and maybe in their snout as well)
they try to say milk, breast, company and the mother gives them spoon, harsh word
and puts them away in anOther room - the infant fantasises this impotent breast
(and identifies with it)
and sometime later gives up their muffled speech..a metonomy of nothing

If someone can not or does not speak, and we take their ‘communications’
as expression of a thwarted desire, directed at an Other
who does not recognise or tried to kill their desire,
is the non-speaking symbolic or imaginary?
Is it an acting out - or might it be a speaking?
I think Lacan speaks of this in seminar 10 but i have not read it for a few years
and no longer have a copy..

In Klossowski’s reading it seems that Nietzshe became aphasic to divest
himself of the master discourse..
in this case, non speaking would be a changing of discourses and so symbolic..?

Any thoughts?

“I also want to separate (m)Other and the Woman who doesn’t exist” (CS)
What do you mean Chris? I don’t think a mother is a missing signifier - in that
it is there in the uncs unlike the Woman.

Comment by Sol — March 30, 2008 @ 1:50 am

I don’t think the mother “only” belongs to the imaginary phase… the end of the mirror stage comes at the age of 18 months. Much as I know Otherness is first denied and the child will acquire language through mechanisms rooted in the mirror stage - imitation of sounds, etc.. however when parents do not give him what he demands, language comes to hold the promise of letting them know… The actual problem concerns the fact that speaking of the demand alters it, and the child who receives the demanded object will discover he no longer wants it. Love, is no longer sufficient, and the child has entered into the world of desire….

Comment by violet — March 30, 2008 @ 3:44 am

I suppose the mirror phase officially ends much earlier, but if we’re somehow shifting from symptom to sinthome - don’t we now have a lifelong preoccupation with mirrors and don’t we have to reassess the ego (and the appropriateness of interpretations with the proximity of so many knots and ties)?

Comment by Chris Sands — March 30, 2008 @ 7:15 pm

message number
a one and two noughts

Comment by Sol — March 30, 2008 @ 11:54 pm

wow, Sol… that is a fortunate instance, and that it did’nt escape your notice, bravo!

Comment by violet — March 31, 2008 @ 1:22 am

Sol: deliberate silence or relinquishing speech in favor other communicative methods always inevitably speaks volumes. In just that way, one cannot but exist without feeding the symbolic - there is no choice except to participate, even if only by the contextual failure to do so at some point or another. Silence becomes expressive by mere contrast to the ubiquitous nattering of the everyday; indeed, it’s the simple fact of this contrast which allows it to traverse communicative pathways inaccessible through speech. Protest, innuendo, awe - the Quiet, only somewhat paradoxically, has a wide vocal range, and a well-timed moment of muteness is a word in itself (hence the Lacanian technique of sessions ended abruptly by the analyst). But, if we take our ontological exile into the symbolic order as both symptom and source of our castrated inability to express ourselves (even and especially TO ourselves), then the (non)statements of the aphasic (or the merely reticent) drive the point home - once castrated, we simply cannot grow THEM back, we can only adopt, substitute, or go without - our lack persists in spite of our (and Neistzche’s) best ad hoc attempts to fill it with silence, and our demand still ultimately goes unvoiced and unmet.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — March 31, 2008 @ 10:00 am

No response: What is this silence trying to tell me . . . ?

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — April 1, 2008 @ 3:20 pm

97- Sol, I think non-speaking is symbolic in that it is still a kind of anunciation (anunciation vs. statement) but by not speaking Nietzsche remains only at the level of anunciation and so fully a subjective figure (a feminine figure); he doesn’t enter the field of objectivity, the field of statement. so in this process the “I” seems to recuperate the split resulted when the “I” is torn apart between the two levels. Can this be possible?!! Can we choose not to speak or the very attempt to do this is again the same, speaking?!

Comment by majid — April 2, 2008 @ 11:55 am

quite a message Braxton,
(’or the merely reticent..’)

good question for me Majid-

thanks
both.

i wonder - if the non speaker fantasises about what the (non) other (non-listener)
thinks of him not speaking, and this is part of the non speaking, then is it
not imaginary..not yet an act, until we discuss it..?

Comment by sol — April 3, 2008 @ 9:15 am

this could all turn into not saying very much …
(via writing a blog, mentioned in forum) I’ve got interested just lately
in the pace of net and email conversations …
so, working on a film too, have these same concerns.
Is this edging somehow towards aphasia or what Lacan calls nirvana in ‘Encore’ or some kind of long distance epiphany???
(Sol) have just got hold of Russell Grigg’s new book, ‘Lacan, Language and Philosophy’.
At first glance it seems interesting and very well written (there’s also a chapter on ‘regulation’.

Comment by Chris Sands — April 3, 2008 @ 10:50 am

“this could all turn into not saying very much …”

Maybe part of the poignancy of non-spoken rhetoric is the reminder it provides of how little there is to say in the first place - silence echos the superfluity of our constant need to communicate - as witnessed by the proliferation of “new media”: blogs, messageboards, chatrooms, shouts into the void - what the hell are any of us talking about anyway? The collective Ego of the online realm is fed, in turn, by the collective human unconcious of all this chatter - a cumulative subjecthood ciphered from false “I”s infinitely scattered in front of keyboards across the globe - and Humanity’s aggregate Ego exalts in the jouissance of this unrestrained abundance of communication, bureaucracy-and-therefore-super-ego-free to an extent never before possible. It’s a masturbatory freedom formerly unrealizable on such a scale.

So, even as our individual Egos revel in their own dissapation back into the larger meta-unconcious, spewing their disassociated words and images into cyberspace, we are realizing a newer, infinitely more vigorous collective anthropocentricity, arising from the confusion.com : billions of false “I”s relinquishing their imagined physical integrity for the sake of the new, emerging, globalized subject-to-be.

… and if that nonesense doesn’t help the process along considerably, then surely there’s nothing more i can do

So folks, what constitutes the big Other of the blogosphere-as-a-collective-subject?

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — April 3, 2008 @ 12:59 pm

Braxton Fuzzledorf, how did you do that…………?
we’ve tried since ever to upload images, and it never works… and this is how the forum came to be, so that we could upload images in there

Comment by violet — April 3, 2008 @ 8:36 pm

/Users/chrissands/Desktop/images-1.jpeg

Comment by Chris Sands — April 4, 2008 @ 4:34 am

Above just tried to see whether possible to shift image from forum to here, but alas no …

Comment by Chris Sands — April 4, 2008 @ 4:36 am

Hi guys - do you mean the emoticon? That just comes up automatically when you type in a smiley (semicolon, dash, closing parenthesis). Posting images would be fun . . . - however, the pace of conversation in the forum seems even slower than here on the messageboard, which interferes with my cyber-jouissance.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — April 4, 2008 @ 11:55 am

this?

Comment by violet — April 4, 2008 @ 1:04 pm

that’s weird - it didn’t work for you . . . puzzling - it just came up like regular typing rather than our happy little yellow friend. it seems to work for me though . .. testing:

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — April 4, 2008 @ 2:09 pm

Sol, returning to aphasia - in the new Russell Grigg book, have just noticed there’s mention of Roman Jacobson’s reference to aphasia

Comment by Chris Sands — April 4, 2008 @ 5:42 pm

Have made reference to Russell Grigg’s Antigone in the ‘art and Lacan symposium’, as next door’s looking neglected. If Antigone can become another forum topic, we could open up the Miller, Zizek, Badiou, Wajcman site … ?

Comment by Chris Sands — April 5, 2008 @ 4:04 am

aphasia as defiance - defiance as a fundamental social stance - defiance and addiction - the agent’s phenomenological deference to the lenses of defiance - the symptomatic cliches of an ostensibly defiant counterculture - the defiance gene? - next on Oprah: how to existentially subdue your defiant teenager - defiance as ideology and ideology as defiance - breeding defiance: the underside of the taboo - co-opting defiance: the not-so-secret history of the rock n’ roll business . . . .
etc.

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — April 5, 2008 @ 3:59 pm

B - was there a link made between aphasia and defiance in this instance?
We can make one, but I was pointing in the direction of readings of Antigone.
If Antigone is driven beyond the social, Grigg suggests, in many ways, she remains tied to the symbolic.
She rejects the State, but doesn’t escape her father.

Comment by Chris Sands — April 5, 2008 @ 5:25 pm

(Admin) - there’s a fault with the symposium next door. Presently, there are two versions showing.

Comment by Chris Sands — April 5, 2008 @ 5:27 pm

Chris - what’s the distinction here between the strucures of paternity and the social? seems like one context in which the symbolic and imaginary overlap . . . allegories capture that in ways our empirical sense does not, which is probably why moral philosophy is so much more effective when it works through fictions and not law.

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — April 5, 2008 @ 7:00 pm

where, how CS…….? I don’t see a problem in the symposium

Comment by admin — April 5, 2008 @ 9:12 pm

(dear Admin) if you scroll down the message box is half way down and beneath it the messages start again.

Comment by Chris Sands — April 6, 2008 @ 3:58 am

Braxton, have replied to 119 on ‘art and Lacan symposium’

Comment by Chris Sands — April 6, 2008 @ 4:12 am

CS - thank you for telling me… I’ll fix it

Comment by admin — April 7, 2008 @ 3:20 am

the “eye” in its separation from the “gaze” understands its nothingness when from a particular point it is looked at. this seems to show that when the “eye” tries to gain mastery over the Other(s) ,this becoms the very point at which it loses its domination (mastery). this is a kind of double-bind, a short circut of levels which can not be synthesized. is this not the the truth of the return of the message in its inverted form which makes the sender itself the final destiny or in other words, you are not recognized by the “Other” but by “Yourself” through the other? is this not the truth of the Miller’s Matrix of “All” and “Nothing” A->N.A->N… in which when you intend to talk about All it directely becomes a non-all?

Comment by Hadi — April 7, 2008 @ 12:13 pm

the act of communicating a message does not mean that someone has got a total understanding of what he/she is going to communicate.the inherent split in every message prevents us from having a firm understanding of the content of the message which we are trying to communicate (or recieve it ).it seems that in communicating a message we unconsciously want the “Other” to- consciously -recognize us but itself(the Other) be unconscious to this fact(that you want the Other to recognize you).so neither the sender nor the reciever of the message has got a firm understanding of the content of the message.is this not true that the content acts as objet petit a, around which the act of communicating circulates and this failure of communicating the content itself is the cause of communication?

Comment by Hadi — April 8, 2008 @ 12:01 pm

Hadi - Hmm, so in order for the content of our communications to effectively traverse intact the fences and concertina wire of the symbolic which separate the “I” from the Other, there would in fact have to be no symbolic and therefore no distinction between “I” and Other; and therefore again no asymetrical lacks in the self or other and thus no objet-a, no separation from the Other, no need for recognition from Other(s), and therefore finally, no need to communicate in the first place. So, if accurate (or perhaps even adequate) communication were achievable it would preclude any need for itself, and likewise the very impossibility of communication is what makes it necessarry. Merely being born might then be the most ontologically counterproductive maneuver any of us could make. Alas, i suppose all tragedy is rooted in the fact that we aren’t presented with a choice in the matter

Eye contact on a fundamental level seems like a mutual acknowledgment of the need for recognition - which is why it can adopt so many different meanings: confrontation, affection, good will, defiance, comprehension, so on. So i think youre right, it would be a prime example of the “inversion of the message” returned to sender as self-recognition realized through the Other; only twofold, so that each pair of eyes (or “Eye”) simultaneously relinquishes its false dominion over the Other(s) as it gets hit with both the boomerang of its own gaze and the sudden understanding of what you call its “nothingness” - BUT HADI, WHAT, MORE EXACTLY, DO YOU MEAN WHEN YOU REFER TO THE NOTHINGNESS OF THE EYE?

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — April 8, 2008 @ 4:06 pm

when you demand recognition from the Other ,for example by sending a kind of message with the expectation of an answer,you do not want the other to understand that you Lack this recognition or in other words you do not directly ask for recognition.on the other hand this demand for recognitin is totaly unconscious in that even you do not have a firm -conscious- understanding of what you are demanding but you unconsciously ask the OTHER TO RECOGNIZE YOU CONSCIOUSLY and itself be unconsious to the fact that you are in need of such a recognition.and so the other does not think of this message as a direct demand but as a kind of act that is an original one-which is a conscious one- .to put it in other words in the exact moment of intending TO recognize the Other this intention vanishes and changes into the DEMAND for recognition FROM the Other which is totaly an unconscious act and therfore the Real content of the message is lost from the consciousness.

Comment by hadi — April 9, 2008 @ 10:55 am

by “nothingness” I mean the eye understands its lack of the gaze.

Comment by hadi — April 9, 2008 @ 10:59 am

actually the Other lacks the gaze too.it seems that the gaze is the object-cause of our looking,which by remaining hidden causes the multiplicity of our looking(for gaze).in fact when i am looked at from a particular angle i find out that i can not see myself from the stance of the Other_i lack this seeing_ and unconsciously think that the Other posseses this gaze,so i directly encounter the gaze through the Other and this exessive Real causes anxiety-when i suddenly encounter the gaze of the other i should except my defeat -.consequently it can be infered that i never can look at the O(o)ther(s) but the look is directed towards myself through the Other.actually when i decide to look at the Other this(directly) changes into the demand to being looked at by the Other.this demand is unconscious in that when i am consciously looking at the Other i am unconsciously looking at myself.so it seems that the impossibility of SEEING the Other is the ultimate cause of our seeing.

Comment by hadi — April 9, 2008 @ 11:58 am

Hadi, am assuming that you’re referring to Seminar X1 - ‘Four Fundamentals of …’.
I’ve read a number of very different interpretations of what Lacan means by ‘looking’ versus the gaze, but my understanding here is that Lacan sets up two terms in opposition to each other, with ‘looking’ on the side of desire, while the gaze is the scopic object of the drive.
As an artist, I could make use of this opposition to make sense of a process which Lacan calls ‘taming the gaze’ or ‘laying down the gaze’ - but in the first place, perhaps, there’s looking. In this same seminar, Lacan suggests, ‘looking’ is possible when we are not at the mercy of the gaze.
When an artist exhibits work, we might say, he or she sets up something in opposition to a mortifying gaze, but becomes the viewer also. The work of art then has to withstand two forms of mortification.

Comment by Chris Sands — April 9, 2008 @ 12:44 pm

Hadi #127:

So you mean like when i have a moment of anticipation that Chris might have answered my question to him in the Symposium about translations of the seminars, what i’m really hoping and looking for is acknowledgement (ontological validation/ vindication) that I exist: but am i seeking this from him SPECIFICALLY, or from the Other in general? Or from both (maybe from him as representative of a larger Other)?

And then when he doesn’t respond (which he hasn’t) the twinge of dissapointment i feel is the result NOT of the fact that i can’t figure out whether or not there are any decent printed translations of the Seminars commercially available, but rather of the failure to gain the requisite acknowledgement of self i sought by asking in the first place. . .

My only qualm with the structure you outline though, is that i’m not so entirely self-unaware that i don’t recognize - even ahead of time - that this is what i’m doing. I mean, i already know on some level that my unconcious is leading me in these directions - therefore, aren’t my Demands for recognition less than fully unconcious? And furthermore, I do not entirely hope to keep Chris unaware that i am seeking recognition from him because there is in me the semi-concious (”pathetic” in the pure sense of the word) hope that his awareness of my need for recognition will subsequently influence his decision of wether or not to grant it in ways amenable to my Demand . . .

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — April 10, 2008 @ 10:12 am

Hadi #129

You, looking at me, looking at you, looking at me, looking . . (ad nauseum). . .

it’s like standing between to mirrors and the infinite regress of images?

it’s like how no one can observe or study a thing without both altering the thing itself and reflexively phenomenologically editing one’s own experiences of it.

There is no passive sight, no pure reception - is that what it means when you say the eye lacks the gaze?

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — April 10, 2008 @ 10:20 am

I might have partially referred to your question with comment 43 in A+L symposium, but seminars translated into English are visible in lots of places on the net. Amazon, for example, will list them.

Comment by Chris Sands — April 10, 2008 @ 12:16 pm

Sorry, i somehow missed your response in the symposium, i see it now. Thank you, Chris.

Perhaps my unconcious seeks self-affirmation by a kind of ritual self-negation, aborting the whole recognition-seeking process by ignoring the response being offered, and experiencing the subsequent “understanding of nothingness” as an inverted (perverted?) mode of Being. . .

Or, maybe overlooking the response is an unconcious means of deferring, and thereby increasing, the felt reward of the recognition - having unconciously ignored the initial response and then unknowingly reapplied for a second response in the message above, i’ve effectively managed to double the ontological gratification of having Chris acknowledge my presence . . . The unconcious motive being to get as much false recognition as possible in a (probably futile) attempt to compensate for the inevitable frustration of my Demand.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — April 10, 2008 @ 1:38 pm

B - it sounds a bit complicated!

Comment by Chris Sands — April 10, 2008 @ 3:22 pm

Hadi 125: “is this not true that the content acts as objet petit a,
around which the act of communicating circulates and this failure
of communicating the content itself is the cause of communication?”

This makes me think of the phatic in analysis
eg hmm’s and ah’s
- indicators that the other remains attentional but with
seemingly no content.
In turn this reminds me of Freud’s imperative
of abstinence
- these acts of non-content neither satisfy nor unduly
frustrate the signalled demand..perhaps then,
allowing the objet a to be (re)constructed..?

Comment by Sol — April 10, 2008 @ 8:00 pm

Chris - complicating things masks the nothingness which underlies them.

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — April 11, 2008 @ 10:05 am

Do we look at the Other? Can we? To me looking at the Other is the reply,
turning back at the hailing, the interpellation of the Other;
that’s why “looking” is alway loaded with anxiety which
reminds me of the hysteric’ anxiety when confronted with
the Other which is always the case, I mean you are always
in the court of the Other; this anxiety is the result of
the not-answerable question “che voi?” So I think you
can never decide to “look”, your looking being always “directed”,
“attracted” from the side of the Other.

Does this feel sensible?

Comment by Majid — April 11, 2008 @ 1:42 pm

Majid, isn’t this the glare of the gaze and another register?

Comment by Chris Sands — April 11, 2008 @ 4:43 pm

Sol_136_the content can not be communicated,i mean to the conscious mind!!!but the “unconscious” minds can communicate the contet to each other ,but this should be done through the Other ,namely the “conscious” mind!conscious minds talk to each other too,but the truth -content-is on the part of the unconscious mind.

Comment by Hadi — April 12, 2008 @ 3:10 am

When i am desperatly expecting the (returne of the)Gaze of the Other,interestingly enough i find out that it is directed towards (an)other, other than myself.in this case i Look at this (an)other but not with an anticipation of its gaze but in order to identify myself with this other-since the other is the object of the desire of the Other-in other words in this case the lack-lack of the gaze of the Other- itself is lacking when i look at this (an)other-to identify myself with-here it seems that when i am looking at the above mentioned “other”-not the Other-i am really looking at(an)Other.is this not the case when i encounter my own specular image in the mirror?when i am looking at myself in the mirror in fact i am looking at(an)Other -not myself-and am able to see myself from the stance of the other-this is the other who sees me-it seems that here i do not expect the returne of the gaze of the other but try to identify myself with this(an)other in order to be the object of the desire of the Other-at whom i can not look and from whose stance i can not see myself-???

Comment by hadi — April 12, 2008 @ 8:09 am

In the mirror what is lacking is the gaze itself.when i want to see myself in the mirror this changes into my seeing the other-because of the lack of the gaze of the other-so i do not encounter the excess of the gaze-somthing more than my completness-and consequantly i can not escape from my own specular image!or in other words here the eye is not seperated from the gaze.to put it in other words there isn’t any Diffrence & deference between “I” and the “Other” when we are looking at our specular image in the mirror.so when we are looking at the Other or when we intend(consciously) to look at the other_not in the mirror_ we are in the symbolic realm in which there is desire but there isn’t any desire when we encounter our specular image in the mirror(or when we intend to look at ourself).so desire is not produced when i look at the other,but i desire somthing lost when i am looking at myself_ not in the mirror_through the other and the paradoxical point is that i can not understand that “I” am lacking somthing “through” the “Other”!!!the other should just fill in the lack not display(prove)the lack in me.an important point is that intending to do somthing(for example looking at the other)is different from Doing that thing(looking at the other)

Comment by Hadi — April 12, 2008 @ 11:03 am

” So I think you
can never decide to “look”, your looking being always “directed”,
“attracted” from the side of the Other.

Does this feel sensible?

Indeed, and beautifuly put, Majid.

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — April 12, 2008 @ 4:18 pm

Hadi - the layers of vanity run very deep and there is pride in knowing that, which just adds another layer.
Deconstruction, whether it be Lacanian, imagistic, cultural, is maybe an inescapably narcissistic process - and masturbatory like anything else. the book is the phallus of the i/ntellect, the pencil truly mightier than the sword.

and that was that, we were reduced to poetry - BEAUTIFUL poetry - but poetry nonetheless . . . well, numbers too, i suppose . . . there’salways strength to be found in the numbers. let’s unite in the afterlife and make up for lost time.

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — April 12, 2008 @ 4:40 pm

your thoughts were lovely, Hadi and Majid - thank you.

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — April 12, 2008 @ 4:41 pm

I read Zizek’s “How To Read Lacan”, and found it extremely illuminating!

Comment by Majid — April 15, 2008 @ 7:07 am

can you tell us more Majid…….? about the illuminating parts in Zizek’s “How To Read Lacan”, I mean

Comment by alice — April 15, 2008 @ 11:48 pm

Alice- It is illuminating in that in it Zizek explains some of the most basic concepts in Lacan’a thought such as “fantasy”, the “lacking Other”, “enjoyment” and so on; it’s not a thick book so you can read it in two or three days. But in order to cite an example, let me quote a passage from the book itself:
“we thus obtain a relationship that totally subverts the standard notion of the subject who directly experinces himself via his inner states: as strange relationship between the empty, non-phenomenal subject and the phenomena that remain inaccessible to the subject. In other words, psychoanalysis allows us to formulate a paradoxical phenomenology without a subject -phenomena arise that are not phenomena “of” a subject, appearing “to” a subject. This does not mean that the subject is not involved here -it is but precisely in the mode of “exclusion”, as divided, as the agency that is not able to assume the very core of his or her inner experience”. (Zizek, “How to Read Lacan”, p.54)

Comment by Majid — April 16, 2008 @ 11:57 am

-Do you know what really is scary?
–What REALly is scary!

Comment by Majid — April 16, 2008 @ 12:02 pm

Majid, thanks for this passage.
At the moment, despite having done a lot of reading and I’m still doing a lot, I’m not always comfortable with the language of psychoanalysis. As an artist, I want a text to work in a number of ways, but sometimes analysis feels its way with a stick, prodding sometimes. There’s an idea with art that the form that it takes can or must be relative to something conveyed, as if painting talks the language of painting and installations the language of installations etc. So, art is both picky and particular and at times, the language of psychoanalysis struggles close up or at a distance to an object.

Comment by Chris Sands — April 16, 2008 @ 6:14 pm

Chris- I got your point about Formalism in arts,
the decorum; but I am not sure that if
I understood it about psychoanalysis!
do you mean that its language is crude
or something? that is the way the scientific laguage is.
could I get what you meant? I am not sure!

Comment by Majid — April 17, 2008 @ 12:01 pm

Well, certainly not that its language is crude, but with the symposium (next door) we have art and psychoanalysis, a relationship or lack of one. Here there’s a messageboard and I have in mind Marie Helene Brousse’s paper ‘When it Ceases’. In it, MHB refers to the ‘atemporality’ of the unconscious (’The unconscious is very precisely the hypothesis that one doesn’t only dream when asleep’). The analyst then refers to instances when the spell is broken in psychoanalysis (’Psychoanalysis treats the unconscious, this dream of eternity, with speech: to tell this dream is to take it out of eternity’).

MHB writes: ‘Whether it ceases or doesn’t cease is the element that signals the relation to time that logical categories have in psychoanalysis, whether in the form of neccessity, contingency or the impossible’.
And if scansion sometimes wakes the dreamer, perhaps contemporary art has some bearing on the language of psychoanalysis. When Zizek refers to ‘Lacanese’, he’s not talking about ‘mortality’ (’don’t forget that you are mortal’) in a clinical setting, but about the spell of psychoanalysis.

Comment by Chris Sands — April 17, 2008 @ 5:49 pm

Chris - are talking talking about the use of art in actual clinical practice or are the parallels youre drawing deeper than that? What is the unconcious’ relationship to art? This eternal dream that scansion occasionaly tickles into the realm of being and temporality for brief, stacatto moments - is that what we are looking at when we view a painting or a film?

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — April 18, 2008 @ 9:14 am

Hi Chris! As I perceived, your approach to arts in general is “Romantic”. Am I right? When you speak of “the dream of eternity” it is very close to the concept of “Organic unity” and the artist as a “redeemer”, as the “Prophet”. This, of course, is one of the most important and one very compatible with psychoanalysis in general. But as Lacan himself said, “the unconscious is structured like a language”; and also that the unconscious is the field of “signifiers” without any signified. So this is the same view about Language in general adopted by the structuralists and super-structuralists or deconstructionists including Lacan himself. I accept that we cannot render the eternal play of the signifiers in the dream legible, but this is the case with everything from the view-point of the above mentioned school of thought. Can we ever grasp the totality of a piece of art by looking at it, independent of language?

Comment by Majid — April 18, 2008 @ 12:19 pm

Majid - can we ever grasp ANYTHING independent of language?

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — April 18, 2008 @ 2:49 pm

Majid, Braxton, perhaps I was commenting on what I think has been called a ‘transference to psychoanalysis’ (and reference was to the language of psychoanalysis). I think in general terms, contemporary art may be moving away from a romanticism and if the ’sublime’ can be associated with a movement dating from the early nineteenth century, in another sense we seem to be moving from sublimation to sinthome. I think Lacan looks at Joyce’s writing and compares the work of art and the work of therapy, but now perhaps there’s reference to an unconscious which is real, alongside one that’s symbolic. My question then is, can we use Lacan’s four discourses - in any way - to make sense of Joyce’s writing?

Comment by Chris Sands — April 18, 2008 @ 3:11 pm

Chris- Uhum! let me think about it.

Braxton- That is what I meant. I think we can no more do that! And if this is the case, then the totality is only a “fantacy”!

Comment by majid — April 19, 2008 @ 2:02 am

re. 155 - Am tempted to say you might - catch a falling star and put in your pocket (and save it for a rainy day) - but I’m using words to make sense or nonsense and (if fortunate enough) you may not be familiar with old British pop songs - so, isn’t scansion linked to a moment that in some instances possibly stops something wordy in live sessions?

Comment by Chris Sands — April 19, 2008 @ 3:49 am

re-156: I liked your “movement from sublimation to sinthome! But I think “sinthome” is more sublime than “sublimation”!

Does this feel sensible, Braxton? I am not sure!

Comment by majid — April 19, 2008 @ 12:41 pm

Just like to say hello to everybody. Braxton is rather prolific. Well done Braxton. Words are speaking and language is talking. Well done Admin still the best site on the Web.

Comment by Terry1 — April 19, 2008 @ 5:48 pm

thank you Terry1… we’ve missed you

Comment by admin — April 19, 2008 @ 7:37 pm

159: Certainly, Majid - a good play on the words. Insofar as i understand it, sinthome is sublime precisely because it goes beyond mere sublimation. Which makes it interesting to think about, as per Chris, in terms of the work of the artist. It seems like one of the few spaces in the deconstructed Lacanian universe in which a space is opened for any kind of “majesty” (for lack of better term) to coincide with human behavior and for a work of art to trangress the boundaries of the signifier - perhaps, after all, we can express things outside (but not independently of) the symbolic realm by manipulating symbols with/through our art, so that jouissance can sometimes attain something more than a mere symptomatic expression - is sinthome like a wormhole into the Real in some ways . . . ? - in any case, this would place the artist back into the avant garde of human communication (or “ill communication”, if i might be so indulgent as to apply the already outmoded slang of 90’s hip-hop music to our previous discussions with Hadi about the dynamics of addressing the Other) by empowering them with the ability to lay an inverted seige against the kingdom of signifiers and signified. And it escapes the futility of our attempts to express anything independent of the symbolic order by violently embracing it, wrestling with it and never losing nor winning (maybe this is why a work of art is never really final and the work of the true artist frequently takes on a compulsory sort of character), but merely breifly BECOMING that symbolic violence, opening that little chaotic parenthetical within the meta-paragraph of the ostensibly logical.

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — April 20, 2008 @ 11:06 am

Something sin-thom-atic is sometimes seen as somehow having to do with a fourth register or the sinthome is one of the names of the father, but its also only visible retroactively, as with Joyce. With the world(s) of contemporary art there are symptoms that often look like symptoms of a ’society of the spectacle’ forty years on (Marco Focchi LacInk 31), but when Joyce’s symptom is also a symptom of resistance to the British (and Roman) empires, SHOULD we cast a Lacan of the letter up against something potentially far more pervasive?

A ‘true artist’ like a ‘good dead father’ may be a dead artist, but there’s such an urgency on the wind and this urgency, like Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’, threatens any talk of resistance with localized ‘excommunication’. If we just tinker here with the rudiments of theory, don’t we condemn our subject to a museum piece psychoanalysis?

Resistance to a disjunction of theory and practice is mounting in Lacanian circles (see forum), but here (stuck with the internet) we might use the site next door (a+L symposia) ‘to talk more personally’. With contemporary art, the personal is political when the pervasive foreclosures of everyday life force us towards art and television’s proxy lives?

Comment by Chris Sands — April 21, 2008 @ 4:30 am

please see the above alongside a small blog offering (https://chrissands.wordpress.com/). I used to put bits of texts from ongoing work next door and some new work will find its way onto an attached website shortly, but the symposia could be a place for collaborations and something quite personal. In some senses ‘a personal art’ (like psychoanalysis) is also a one by one and there’s a large space next door …

Comment by Chris Sands — April 21, 2008 @ 4:41 am

Braxton, thank you for your beautiful allaboration!

Comment by Majid — April 21, 2008 @ 6:55 am

“If we just tinker here with the rudiments of theory, don’t we condemn our subject to a museum piece psychoanalysis?”

A loaded question, and that despite my not even knowing what you really mean.

Who’s our subject, if not especially ourselves?

The rudiments are the implements only, their application never prescribed, we’re given tools but no medium, or a medium but no tools, and the art is in the invention we generate in spite/defiance of the lack. The “true artist” is a dead artist indeed, because their art is finally incomplete and becomes tool or medium for the rest of us, who are the “false artists”, not yet dead and working with borrowed supplies . . .

“a personal art” - “one by one”? “museum peices”? the internet as the infinite gallery, an endless display, the totality of the mundane placed atop a white pillar under the soft, flattering light of our own gazes? And this virtual realm a trangression of finitude - an act of defiance? Is THE Human Art the very creation of space within the symbolic order for that/our art? is this act of finding and opening new spaces itself the sinthome?

The virgin canvas itself is sublime in ways the never finished picture can’t attain.

Comment by braxton fuzzledorf — April 21, 2008 @ 11:23 pm

B - your Yves Klein-ism is fine, but isn’t this version of an aesethetics the same as theory without practice, state prescription of who can practice and James Joyce without empires???

Comment by Chris Sands — April 22, 2008 @ 2:56 am

Chris, i suddenly feel very ignorant: i didn’t realize it was Yves Kleinism, i’ve never read her (or Joyce) - as for the rest of your charges, i’m not sure how they follow . . . the post wasn’t meant to be an argument for any specific practical approach to either art or psychoanalysis, nor a full theory of aesthetics. Where do you see state, empire, or prescription? How does a disjunction between theory and practice arise from what i’ve ?

i wasn’t trying to challenge any of your views, only understand them . . .

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — April 22, 2008 @ 12:00 pm

B - what I had to say was quite simple, especially suggested use of the other site, but diversions may be part of the territory.
Yves Klein was an artist who invented a colour called ‘international James Joyce blue’.

Comment by Chris Sands — April 22, 2008 @ 4:05 pm

Well then, i’ll respond to the symposia . . .

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — April 22, 2008 @ 4:30 pm

In the mood for some quotations:

“No matter how close I get to the object of desire, its cause remains at a distance, elusive”. -Zizek (˜Lacan)

Comment by Majid — April 26, 2008 @ 11:47 am

“Love is Murder”. -Otto Wieninger

Comments are welcomed!

Comment by Majid — April 26, 2008 @ 11:51 am

‘Last night I dreamed I ate a ten-pound marshmallow, and when I woke up the pillow was gone.’ Tommy Cooper

Comment by Chris Sands — April 26, 2008 @ 1:48 pm

So, chris, do you think Tommy ate the pillow first or the other way around?!;)

Comment by majid — April 28, 2008 @ 11:59 am

“Since Freud does not yield to the originality of his experience, we can see him obliged to summon in it an element that rules it beyond life – and which he calls death drive.
The indication here given by Freud to his followers can only shock those whose dream of reason is nourished by the monsters it produces, following Goya’s precise formula.”
(”Seminar on The Purloined Letter”, in Ecrits II)

lifted from WAP site

Comment by Chris Sands — April 28, 2008 @ 5:06 pm

have posted a ‘black paintings’ thumbnail to accompany the above
https://www.lacan.com/forum.html
see Miller-Wajcman-Badiou-Zizek (a+L symposium annexe)

Comment by Chris Sands — April 28, 2008 @ 5:26 pm

I love the Tommy Cooper story…. is there a lacanian connotation at all?
marshmaLLOW
piLLOW

Comment by alice — April 30, 2008 @ 1:45 am

There can be, Alice! He ate the pillow (really) to stop “dreaming” and continue dreaming in reality. I have in my mind Lacan’s discussions on dreams; that dreams can reveal the reality of our “fantasies” and it’s drastically unbearable; its lightness is unbearable for actually it’s nothing, a void. So we wake up in order to continue dreaming (in the raw meaning of the word) in reality and avoid confronting with the “reality”. It’s again turned out to be playing with words, but that’s the way it is, I can’t help it!

Comment by majid — April 30, 2008 @ 2:21 am

re 177
I hope not … even if Goya lived on marshmallows while he was painting the ‘black paintings’

Comment by Chris Sands — April 30, 2008 @ 3:20 am

What are you questioning mahid? Lacan’s theory of dreams, or the fact of life - that dreams behave the way you describe in your post?
your “unbearable” sounds equivocal

Comment by alice — April 30, 2008 @ 1:05 pm

I was in Buenos Aires with the WAP Encounter, and this is how I know the topic for the next Encounter is: Semblance and the Sinthome

Comment by violet — April 30, 2008 @ 4:40 pm

Violet, was a list of texts published at the conference?

Comment by Chris Sands — May 1, 2008 @ 3:26 am

CS: you can read more about the VIth Congress of the WAP ( World Association of Psychoanalysis)
the objects a in the psychoanalytic experience
at their own website:
https://www.amp2008.com/en/template.asp

Comment by violet — May 1, 2008 @ 9:57 pm

thanks Violet

Comment by Chris Sands — May 2, 2008 @ 3:01 am

Here’s a semantic, but (to me) interesting question:

Was Lacan a Naturalist?

Comment by Braxton Fuzzledorf — May 2, 2008 @ 12:05 pm

Have never seen a photo of him without clothes

Comment by Chris Sands — May 2, 2008 @ 6:15 pm

After two days, my very poor ‘Tommy Cooper impersonation’ (above) is the subject of a cold draught… !!

Comment by Chris Sands — May 4, 2008 @ 5:33 am

it wasn’t my question that turned your impersonation into a cold draught, the cold draught was sneaked in there - in search of a subliminal effect

Comment by alice — May 4, 2008 @ 8:58 am

our fantasies structure our ‘reality’ and keep us away from the raw “Reality” so it was not the intrusion of the signal from external reality(eating the pillow) that awoke the unfortunate dreamer ,but the unbearable character of what he encountred in the dream in order to avoid confronting the Real.when his sleep was disturbed by eating the pillow the dreamer constructed a dream in order to continue his dream(eating marshmallow).however what he encountered in the dream was more unbearable than reality so he awakened to avoid it.

Comment by Hadi — May 4, 2008 @ 11:32 am

Mmmm… marshmallows, pillows apart, have been struggling with a sentence in LacInk 31.
JA Miller writes (page129), ‘The experience of traumatism, an experience in the analytic cure, is the experience of pregnancy.’

Comment by Chris Sands — May 4, 2008 @ 11:33 am

A little bit further, still on page 129, JA Miller says “The question that is posed at the beginning on the status of traumatism—a retroactive status—implies conditions so that, in the third part, one can speak of sexual jouissance as outside the system, and its signifier, the phallus, also as outside system.”
during pregnancy, the baby is a part of the mother, still not a permanent part… and so is trauma?

Comment by violet — May 5, 2008 @ 1:01 am

My reading is retroactive, but the text leaves me confused. From the point view of the mother, surely the unborn child can be part of her sexual jouissance, which possibly leaves birth and what happens beyond pregnancy as potentially traumatic. In this sense, doesn’t ‘outside the system’ imply something prior to sexuation theories?

Comment by Chris Sands — May 5, 2008 @ 3:48 am

woman undermines the symbolic order(makes it inconsistant)by its lack of an exception which becomes the cause for male fantasies _about a woman “in herself”_.so woman becomes a pure appearance without any reality behind the surface which makes it more enigmatic!woman pretends what she is!!and this is the true enigma for a man since he can never know when she is truthful!woman is her own enigma too and this is the true lesson of lacan when he said:woman does not exist, which means woman is a subject par excellance.does this not mean that man in his distrust of symbolic order err more than woman??

Comment by Hadi — May 5, 2008 @ 12:26 pm

As a visual artist, I am not sure I would have gone so far in my work, if I did not have Lacan’s words to resonate within my imagination, and inspire me
further as a poet’s words could inspire me. I used to feel embarrassed not to be able to talk intelligently about his ideas and theories. But I don’t read him like that, and I believe that an artist can actually “get it” in a different way. I have re-cognized otherwise impenetrable elements in my work thanks to him, and found it very encouraging.
Has anyone had a similar experience?
Carmen Teixidor

Comment by carmen teixidor — May 5, 2008 @ 2:56 pm

Carmen, check out the site alongside the messageboard called ‘art and Lacan symposium’ - there’s an icon at the top next to ‘archive’.
And it was good to hear what you said …

Comment by Chris Sands — May 5, 2008 @ 4:42 pm

hi Chris,
thank you for your response.
can i enter a video in the archives? or somewhere else?
i have in mind a short called “the story of two ears”
carmen

Comment by carmen teixidor — May 5, 2008 @ 5:29 pm

Hello Carmen,
the archives (above) are archives for the messageboard, whereas the symposium https://www.lacan.com/lacart.htm is a place for that art and Lacan connection. If you go into the symposium you will see that its a project set up to look at collaborations or perhaps a personal take on ‘the work of art’. The symposium like this messageboard is only set up for text, but if you go to the site marked ‘forum’ and log in, you will a ’symposium annexe’ which will take images and possibly video. To be able to sometimes refer to my own work (in the symposium), I set up my own wordpress blog https://chrissands.wordpress.com/, which would certainly permit video. But have a look at the symposium and the forum https://www.lacan.com/forum.html first re. video or best of all talk to Perfume (via the main site).

Comment by Chris Sands — May 5, 2008 @ 6:07 pm